


Permanent Record

by Chocolatehamburgers



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Artist Steve, Bruce and Thor were just busy okay, Gen, I still love them even though they aren't in this fic, tattooed steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:00:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chocolatehamburgers/pseuds/Chocolatehamburgers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers wakes up from the ice physically exactly the same as how he went in it.  That seems wrong to him, considering how different everything else is.  But he's Captain America; scars fade from his skin far faster than from his mind. </p><p>So he sets out to find a new way to mark the record, and reconciles with his new team along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent Record

**Author's Note:**

> This came out way longer and less organized that I planned it, but I guess it happens. 
> 
> Anyway, I really like the idea of Steve being disturbed that all his experiences don't change him physically like they do most people, and so he goes out and gets a bunch of tattoos and then the team is fascinated and sort of surprised, because he seems like such a stick-in-the-mud. 
> 
> This isn't really Steve/Tony but I'll ship it to my dying day and I think you might be able to tell.

Captain America retains no marks. Oh, he’s taken hits. He’s been shot with bullets, lasers, alien rays--just about anything. He’s been burned and frozen and crushed and broken beyond the limits of a normal human body, but in the end, he is always flawless Captain America again; perfectly shaped muscles sliding under smooth skin. Captain America has no scars. 

Steve Rogers has plenty. 

He wakes up at precisely four-oh-eight every morning in a bed that is too soft and too cold, shivering and sweaty. More often than not he doesn’t remember his dreams, but he can all too easily guess what they were about. The war; bombs and bullets and the uncertainty of life-or-death on a knife’s edge. The ice; he doesn’t remember it, but his bones do, late at night and when stormy winds blow. Bucky. 

Waking up to a world that is simultaneously so full of life and movement and so empty. Looking into a face that aches of Howard but is older and more distant and so much more angry, bitter with all it has lost. 

He appreciates and respects his new team. Of course he does. They are skilled and admirable people. But he can’t look at them without thinking ‘temporary’, just a replacement until the Commandos come back. They are still so fresh in his mind, but to this world, they are relics. 

He is not a relic. Captain America is as fresh and gleaming as the day he stepped out of the pod that created him. 

So he leaves, after they’ve saved the world--him and his temporary team. The world is a whole lot less grateful than he thinks they should be, but he didn’t really expect anything more. He leaves and gets on his bike (a gift from SHIELD. He rides it even though it feels like bribery, because he is not so proud as to pass up free equipment,) and he follows whichever roads look the most interesting. 

He spends a lot of time drawing. 

It comes back quickly enough, though the first time he picks up a pencil his fingers feel suddenly cold and stiff. The drawings are simple, at first, just pencil sketches in a cheap notebook. Then somewhere in in a tiny town in Philadelphia he picks up a bigger sketchbook and a pack of pastels. In Toledo he adds some brush-tip pens and a stick of charcoal. By the time he hits the west coast he has a whole bag full of art supplies, and a plan. 

SHIELD is starting to get antsy, so he begins his journey back east. He doesn’t hurry, though, stopping whenever he feels like it and often zig-zagging miles out of his way to check out a landmark that a local in the last town had told him about. 

Occasionally he would ask around about a local tattoo artist. 

 

\--

 

It takes him nearly two months to make it back to New York. When he finally gets there, he finds himself at the base of Stark Tower, though he had had every intention of reporting to SHIELD first. 

Oh well. He shrugs, and goes in. 

There’s a voice in the ceiling that he pretends not to be startled by, and he runs into a rather frightening da--lady who just gives him a long look and gestures toward a set of stairs leading down. 

He smiles at her as politely as he knows how and goes down them. 

Tony’s workshop is not really what he expected. It’s far less...shiny, for one thing. From what he can see through the glass wall, there are grease-rags and scrap littering the work tables, and random piles of junk parts scattered here and there. Granted, one large portion of it seems to be devoted to a collection of gleaming vintage cars, but it was Tony Stark. 

He has to knock ridiculously hard to get Tony to hear him over his blaring music, and then when he is noticed he’s not sure for a second if he’s going to be let in. After a second of incredulous staring, Tony gestures and says something to the air, and the door clicks open. 

“Hey, Stark.” he greets, stepping into the room. It smells like concrete and motor oil and metal, and just a little bit like smoke. 

“Cap,” replied Tony, grinning his distant grin, “what a surprise. I heard Fury’s been busting a vein over your little disappearing stunt. Threatened to send Nat after you.” 

He feels a flicker of surprise and maybe something like envy at that, because since when was Widow Nat? He squashes it just as quickly as it arises, and shrugs. 

“I just got back. I thought I’d check in, and well, you’re the easiest to locate.” He grins, trying for a little humor, poking fun at the huge tower. 

Tony doesn’t look amused. 

“You’re lucky you caught me, actually,” he says, spinning back around in his chair and returning to....whatever he’s working on. “I’m a busy man, Cap, I don’t spend all my time hanging out in my--frankly awesome--giant tower.” 

Steve isn’t sure what to say to that, so he just says, “Right,” and shifts awkwardly. 

There is silence for a bit. Tony seems perfectly comfortable with this, his attention on the piece of no-doubt delicate and complicated machinery on his bench, but Steve is starting to feel extremely out of place. 

“Look--” he begins, and then pauses, thinking over his words before he says them. Tony’s reactions are usually...unpredictable, to say the least, and Steve seems too good at saying exactly the wrong thing. 

“I just wanted to say sorry,” he decides on at last, because it’s simple and true. “For when we met. I was out of line and I was wrong, and I hope we can put it behind us.” 

There is another long moment of silence. Steve is just beginning to wonder if Tony even heard him when the other man shrugs. 

“Apology accepted, Capybara-buns. It’s nice to see you finally pulled your pretty little head out of your frozen ass and accepted that I’m right.” 

He resists the urge to snap back. “Right. Well. It was nice talking to you.” he says, instead. 

“Bye Cap,” is the distracted reply, and that’s that. 

 

He goes back to SHIELD and is treated to a debriefing that is mostly just him being scolded about availability and ‘what if something had happened while you were AWOL?’ 

Fury seems to expect him to feel guilty, but he really can’t muster it, not until he leaves the conference room and is flanked by Widow and Hawkeye. 

He starts to feel it then, the sense that maybe he had abandoned something when he went looking for....well, he didn’t know what he was looking for. A place. A future. A way to put the past away, maybe. 

 

Hawkeye claps him on the shoulder and grins, chattering about how angry Fury’s been, but Widow remains silent. 

“Spar with me,” she says suddenly, in the middle of Hawkeye’s narrative, and Steve realizes that he’s been lead to the SHIELD gym facilities. He doesn’t want to fight with a dame, but he’s smart enough not to say so, so he agrees. She stands in the center of the mat, waiting patiently while he removes his shoes and socks and carefully unbuttons and removes his plaid dress shirt. 

Then things get a bit de-railed because Hawkeye--Clint--spots the bright colors on his arms and ropes Widow into helping him hold Steve down and remove his undershirt so they can see the whole thing. 

“Wow,” says Clint after a second, leaning back on his haunches, “I never figured you for the tattoo type, Cap.” 

Steve just shrugs, feeling his ears heat up when Widow traces her fingertips over the lines. 

She gives him a look that is so full of quiet understanding that he finds he can’t really think of her as Widow anymore. It’s not the Widow that rubs her thumb over the plummeting plane inked into his shoulder. 

 

His story is splayed across his body, starting on his right arm with his life before the Serum. His mother, Bucky, the poverty that he grew up in. Himself, thin enough that he’s nearly bobbleheaded. The Serum transformation spreads up his shoulder, Peggy, the USO girls. The war and the Commandos is on his back. Then on his left shoulder, a plummeting plane, the ice. He’s left room on his arm there, not sure yet if it was....okay to put his new team onto his skin so permanently. Not without being sure that they were truly his team, not a temporary fighting force. 

He hand-drew every tattoo, and had them done in a myriad of states scattered across the U.S. It’s a timeline of his past, a reminder that this Steve Rogers is not the Steve Rogers from seventy years ago. A way to hold on to this time and let go of the one he came from. 

Some people have scars for that, but he’s not so easily marked. 

 

“Will they stay?” Clint asks, still staring, “I mean, with your super-soldier thing and whatever. Won’t your body reject them?” 

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. Not right away, though. They’ll stay long enough.” 

Someone had once told him, ‘It’s not the destination, it’s the journey that’s important,’ and he was starting to think that saying made more sense than ever.


End file.
